


when it don't come easy

by LiveLaughLovex



Series: i'll brighten up the sky [3]
Category: The Code (TV 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Emotional Hurt-Comfort, F/M, Gen, Post-Season/Series 01, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:42:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23886913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiveLaughLovex/pseuds/LiveLaughLovex
Summary: “You do know there isn’t some secret portal to San Francisco in your living room, right?”Harper groaned at the intrusion, burrowing deeper into the pile of blankets atop her. “Go away, Abe.”(In the aftermath of Garmsir, Harper tells Turnbull she's going to San Francisco to visit her parents. Certain this isn't the truth, Abe drops by her apartment to check in.)
Relationships: John "Abe" Abraham & Harper Li, John "Abe" Abraham/Harper Li
Series: i'll brighten up the sky [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1680631
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	when it don't come easy

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from the song "When It Don't Come Easy" by Sleeping at Last.

“You _do_ know there isn’t some secret portal to San Francisco in your living room, right?”

Harper groaned at the intrusion, burrowing deeper into the pile of blankets atop her. “Go away, Abe.”

“Because if you _are_ aware of that fact,” Abe continued, his tone unchanged, “then that means you _lied_ to General Turnbull about needing this week off to visit your parents.”

She huffed angrily, then removed herself from her cocoon to glare up at him. “Do you not understand what the phrase _go away_ means? Do you need me to say it in German? _Geh weg_. _Jetzt_.”

“I didn’t even know you were _capable_ of lying to your superiors. Have you ever lied to _me_?” he asked curiously.

“I can say it in Italian, too; _va via_. Russian’s _ukhodi_ …”

“You’re avoiding the question,” Abe pointed out helpfully.

“And _you_ are no longer my superior,” she reminded him.

“As of three months ago, that’s true,” he agreed. “Doesn’t account for the previous thirteen, though.”

“Seriously, Abe, _how_ did you get into my apartment?” she questioned tiredly.

“You’re really looking to change the subject, huh?” he remarked, amused, as he headed into her kitchen with several bags full of groceries. “You gave me a key to this place, remember?”

“Yes, so that you could collect my mail while I was in Djibouti,” she sighed, kicking aside the blankets and sitting up on the sofa so she could see him. “Not so you could come and go as you please.”

“You haven’t been answering your phone since you requested time off,” he remarked, opening the door to her refrigerator and frowning at its contents – or, more likely, its lack thereof. “Li, this is pathetic,” he muttered, shaking his head as he turned to meet her gaze. “When’s the last time you went shopping?”

“What is today?”

“The nineteenth,” he replied.

“Then it was definitely the thirty-first.”

“Of October?”

“Of August.”

He closed the refrigerator door, turning to stare at her incredulously. “Harper, it’s the eighteenth of _November_.”

“I _do_ know what month it is, thank you.”

“You haven’t been shopping in three _months_?”

“Well, it’s still technically two,” she protested weakly, sighing when he shot an unimpressed glance her way. “I keep meaning to, but it’s not exactly like we have a job that affords us much free time. It hasn’t been a priority, that’s all.”

“Sure, I get it. I mean, why would buying food be a priority? It’s not like you need it to _live_ or anything,” he agreed sardonically. 

“Okay, I could do without the sarcasm,” she muttered as she turned on the Keurig and began brewing a cup of coffee. “It’s not like we’re here enough for it to be a problem. When we’re not in another state or overseas, I just order in. It’s no big deal.”

“You’re nearly thirty years old and you graduated from Stanford _twice_. You shouldn’t still be ordering in food from that place up the street that’s been closed down by the Health Department three times in the past four years.”

“I think that’s a pretty big exaggeration there, Abraham.”

“No, it’s not. I looked it up.” He glanced over at her as she added sugar and non-dairy creamer to her mug and stirred it before taking a sip. “See, if you went shopping, you could be having that with your soymilk instead of that powdered crap.”

“It’s not crap,” she protested, though he was right; she much preferred soymilk. “You haven’t told me why you’re here yet.”

“You haven’t been answering your phone,” he repeated. “Despite the fact that you told everyone you were going to San Francisco, a highly-populated area with numerous phone towers. Didn’t take me long to figure out you hadn’t been all that truthful about where you were headed.” He glanced around once more. “It looks like I was right. If I had to hazard a guess, you haven’t stepped out of this apartment in at least seventy-two hours.” He turned back toward her, an eyebrow raised as if to challenge her. “How far off am I?”

“I…” She trailed off, not wanting to give him the satisfaction. “That’s none of your business.”

He nodded once, accepting her rebuttal, then turned back to the empty fridge. “You’re right. If you end up starving yourself, though, and we’re suddenly down a prosecutor, that’ll definitely be my business.”

“I’m not going to starve,” she muttered exasperatedly. “Like I said, I’ve been…”

“Ordering in, yeah,” he finished. “You said that already. But you’ve been here three days and are still without soymilk. Why, exactly, are you still using powdered creamer? I’ve heard your opinion of that stuff multiple times over the past year. It’s never been good.”

She shrugged. “Improvise, adapt, and overcome, right? I’m sticking to my training.”

“That training is meant to be practiced in the middle of a warzone, not in a two-bedroom apartment in northern Virginia,” he pointed out.

She scoffed humorlessly. “I just – I haven’t really been in the mood for human interaction these past few days, Abe.”

“You haven’t been in the mood for human interaction since we got back from Afghanistan _weeks_ ago,” he corrected pointedly. “You convinced General Turnbull that you didn’t need to talk to someone.”

Her eyes shot to his. “How’d you know about that?”

“She told me. As did Maya. You have them both worried. You have all of us worried, if I’m being totally honest.” He tilted his head slightly, attempting to meet her gaze. “You should talk about it. Whatever it is that happened over there.”

“I don’t need to,” she replied insistently. “It’s not like it’s going to change anything if I do.”

“You’re right. It’s not going to change the outcome of what happened that day. Might make it easier for you to breathe now, though.” He sighed quietly when she simply shook her head, glancing away to stare at her wall for a moment. “Harper, I know you think you don’t need to talk about it. I get that. What I’m also very aware of is the fact that feeling that way is just further evidence you need to talk to someone.”

“I can’t relive it,” she told him emptily, still refusing to meet his gaze. “I can’t talk about it, because I do not even want to think about it. And I am not going to sit in some stranger’s office, staring at pictures on the wall, just counting down the minutes until I can leave. That is not how I want to spend my time.”

“So, what?” he questioned, gesturing around them. “You’d rather hide out on your sofa, pretending the last month didn’t happen? Because I hate to tell you, Harper, but this bubble’s eventually going to burst. You’ve very talented, but even you can’t keep this charade up for much longer.”

“You’re asking me to relive what happened that day, but you don’t seem to get that I can’t.”

“No,” he denied immediately. “I’m not. I’m asking you to stop pretending everything is fine when it so clearly isn’t. You don’t have to talk about what happened that day to anyone, Harper. Not me or Maya or even your shrink. That’s okay. I won’t hold that against you. But you need to eat. You need to sleep; you need to get out of this apartment. You need to face whatever it is that is keeping you locked away   
in here, because this? This isn’t healthy.”

“Do you know why I requested this week off?” she asked suddenly.

“No,” he replied, confused. “I have no idea.”

“It’s because Major Garrity’s wife called me last Friday,” she informed him absently, grabbing an orange from the basket on her counter. She began picking at the peel despite having no intention of eating the fruit inside, still refusing to meet his gaze. “The doctors at Walter Reed can’t do anything for him. He is going to be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. There was hope before, but it’s gone now. He’s just got to… live with it, I guess, which seems so beyond unfair it’s ridiculous.”

“What happened to Garrity wasn’t your fault,” he reminded her. “There was no possible way you could have known…”

“He’s got three kids under the age of five,” she continued on as if she hadn’t heard him. Her dark eyes glistened with unshed tears as they finally met his. “His littlest, his only daughter, she’s only six months old. He’d barely met her when they shipped him off to Garmsir. He’ll never get to chase her around the yard. And the others, the boys? He’ll be in a wheelchair the rest of their lives. He won’t be able to stand and cheer at football games or play basketball with them or teach them how to run the bases. He’ll just have to watch as others do it for him.”

“And that sucks,” Abe agreed softly. “It does. But he’ll get to see it. He’ll still get to watch them win the championships and run around in the yard with their mother. He’s going to _be_ there for them, and that is because of you. If you hadn’t been out there with him that day, that might not have been the case.”

“If I hadn’t been out there with him that day, none of this would’ve happened,” she fired back.

“Harper,” he sighed gently. “That’s not true. The major’s unit drove down that road every single day. It was always a safe way for them to get back to Camp Dwyer, until the day it wasn’t. It isn’t your fault that you just so happened to be in the Humvee with them when that day came. Nobody could’ve known that IED was there, or that those insurgents were just waiting to attack. You shouldn’t be sitting here blaming yourself for something that was completely out of your control.”

“You do it all the time,” she remarked petulantly.

“Yes,” he agreed unhesitatingly. “I do. And I was even worse about it in the past. I’m aware telling you to stop blaming yourself makes me a hypocrite. I’m just choosing to do it anyway.”

“Abe,” she breathed, sounding more exhausted than he’d ever heard her, “why are you here?”

“Honestly? I don’t trust you to be by yourself right now,” he replied. “You’re not in a good place, Harper. I know that, because I’ve been there myself, and no matter how many times I said it, being left by myself was the last thing I actually wanted.” He gently removed the orange from her hands. “It’s also extremely boring in the office without you. Trey and Maya are poor substitutes. They just don’t get exasperated as often as they should.”

She cracked a smile at that, though it quickly disappeared. “It’s noon on a Monday. Why’re you here and not there?”

“I’m well aware of how full of myself I am, Harper, but even I can trust other prosecutors to handle my cases from time to time. Carmichael’s got it under control.”

“Carmichael’s twelve,” she muttered irritably. 

“Carmichael’s twenty-six,” he corrected, amused. “That’s only three years younger than you.”

“Well, she’s entirely too happy. Like, freakishly happy. She’s always smiling. Nobody smiles that much.”

“The Corps hasn’t completely blackened her soul yet,” he remarked drily. “Give it time.”

“I don’t know if I have the patience for that,” Harper returned honestly.

“Well, try,” Abe requested with an exasperated smile. It quickly faded into something much gentler as he met her gaze once more. “I was right earlier, wasn’t I?”

“Right about what?” she sighed tiredly, finally allowing her exhaustion to show through.

“You haven’t left this apartment at all in the past seventy-two hours,” he said softly.

“No,” she admitted, meeting his gaze. “I haven’t.”

“Okay. Well, we need to fix that.” He placed a final bag of vegetables in her crisper drawer. “It’s almost time for lunch. We could go to Giorgio’s, take a walk around the park after. I promise I won’t make you talk to anyone other than me and the waitress.” He paused for a moment. “Though I suppose you don’t have to talk to either of us; it’ll just make for a particularly interesting meal if you don’t.”

She huffed a laugh, drawing in a deep breath before replying. “Just lunch and a walk?”

“Yes,” he promised. “That’s it. What do you say, Captain Li? You willing to be seen out in public with me?”

She considered the offer for a moment, then nodded. “Sure.”

“Yeah?” he checked.

“Yeah,” she confirmed. “That sounds good. Just let me…” She gestured to her pajamas. “I don’t think a lot of people would appreciate if I wore these into public. I should probably shower, too,” she tacked on as an afterthought.

He nodded. “Take all the time you need. I’ll be waiting here when you’re ready.”

“Okay,” she murmured, offering a timid smile before she headed for the bedroom. She turned on her heel at the last moment, considering him for several seconds before speaking again. “Hey, Abe?” She waited until he’d glanced up before continuing. “Thanks.”

“Of course,” he replied with a fond smile of his own. “Anytime.”

-o-

“My mother called,” Harper informed him softly, staring out at the pond as she and Abe sat side-by-side on a park bench in Stafford. “After we got back from Garmsir.”

“She did?” Abe questioned, turning his head to look at her. “Well, I guess that makes sense. She knew you were hurt while we were over there.”

She nodded once, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. “I know she was told, but I just wasn’t expecting her to… my mother never calls me,” she explained. “ _Ever_ , but she did this time, and I broke down and cried in the middle of our conversation, which, in hindsight, likely did very little to convince her I’m as okay as I’ve been telling everyone I am.”

“She’s your mother,” Abe pointed out helpfully. “I’m pretty sure she already knew.”

“Are you implying my mother has ESP?” she questioned incredulously.

“Of course not,” Abe denied. “I’m implying _all_ mothers have ESP. What?” he questioned laughingly, catching sight of her disbelieving expression. “I’m just saying, it’d explain a lot about my childhood. Would it not explain a lot about yours?”

“I was raised by nannies,” she reminded him pointedly.

He winced quietly, shaking his head. “And suddenly, this conversation’s taken a dark turn.”

“Sorry,” she apologized quietly, still smiling slightly as she drew in a deep breath. “It’ll get better one of these days, won’t it?” she asked after a moment, glancing over at him. “I won’t always feel like I’m going to…” She trailed off, unable to put her emotions into words.

Abe seemed to understand what she was trying to say anyway. “No,” he promised, wrapping am arm loosely around her and giving her shoulders and gentle squeeze. “You won’t. It’s going to get better.”

She nodded once, then sniffled. “I still don’t want to talk about it.”

“That’s okay,” he agreed easily.

She glanced up at him curiously. “You don’t think I should?”

“I think you _absolutely_ should,” he corrected gently. “And you will, eventually. It doesn’t have to be right now, though. It should be when _you’re_ ready, not when anyone else _wants_ you to be.”

She nodded once, flashing a self-deprecating smile. “And you’re fine with not knowing how long your co-counsel’s going to be a basket case in the meantime?”

“You’re _not_ a basket case, Harper,” he denied firmly.

“I feel like one,” she sighed, redirecting her gaze to the water.

“Well, you’re not.”

“Still, though. You’re okay waiting?” she asked again.

He glanced down at her. “I already told you, Harper. Take all the time you need, and I’ll be here when you’re ready.”

“I don’t know when that’ll be.”

“That’s okay,” he promised. “Patience is my strong suit.”

She laughed quietly at that, unable to help herself. “No,” she denied, amused. “It isn’t.”

“Not usually,” he conceded. “I’ve got all the time in the world for the things that matter, though.”

She didn’t have it in her to truly ponder the meaning of his words. Instead, she moved a bit closer and continued to stare out at the pond, allowing herself, at least for that moment, to simply _be_.

**Author's Note:**

> It's a headcanon of mine that both Abe and Harper speak, like, half a dozen languages, mostly because I have this mental picture of them muttering to each other in German or Italian or something in the middle of court and just confusing the hell out of everyone around them, which, for whatever reason, is a greatly amusing concept to me.


End file.
